Christopher Durang stars in own play at Bucks County Playhouse

Christopher Durang, as Vanya, and Marilu Henner, as Masha, get ready for a costume party in the Bucks County Playhouse production of Durang's Tony Award-winning play "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike."Mandee Kuenzle

With its new production of the Tony Award-winning play “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which opened last week for a run through Aug. 10, the Bucks County Playhouse is spotlighting two of New Hope, Pa.’s great resources: Christopher Durang the playwright and Christopher Durang the actor.

Durang’s play premiered as the season opener at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 2012, then went on to New York, where it played a sold-out run off-Broadway at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. It then moved to Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, where it closed last year after 201 performances.

When “Vanya” won the Tony Award as best play on June 9, 2013, Durang’s acceptance speech disclosed the fact that he had been writing plays since 1958, when he was in the second grade.

Since it won the Tony, productions of this play have sprouted everywhere, but the Bucks County Playhouse production brings the play back home to New Hope, where the action is set and Durang lives.

It also brings back to New Hope as Masha actress Marilu Henner, best known as a star of TV’s “Taxi” and who starred in last season’s “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” as well as Sheryl Kaller, who directed at the Playhouse last season the world premiere of Terrance McNally’s “Mother and Sons,” now enjoying a Broadway run.

The production also features Durang the actor as Vanya, and introduces to New Hope Deirdre Madigan, who plays Sonia, as she did in the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s production last spring.

Was it intimidating for director Kaller to have the award-winning author in her cast? Kaller says “no.” In performance, is it intimidating to act alongside the play’s author each night? Madigan says “no.” Both women obviously adore Durang in either capacity.

“I’ve known Chris for years,” Kaller says, “and I just love this play. We have discussed other productions of this play together in private, but not in front of the current cast, and I admire Chris for his ability to keep his two identities separate. If he brings up prior stagings, it’s to help this cast over some rough spot, like what happens if a glass gets broken on stage.“

“I was more intimidated when he came to see the Philadelphia production,” Madigan says, “because I didn’t know him at all then. Now, after working with him intensely for our two-week rehearsal period and getting to know him as a person and fellow actor, I’m very comfortable. He’s let us in on some things it’s really fun to know about.

“When I auditioned for the Philly production of a play I hadn’t seen, I discovered that Sonia has to do a very convincing Maggie Smith imitation,” Madigan adds. “Now, Maggie Smith, especially because of her recurring role in all the Harry Potter films, is very well known. (Not to mention her “Downton Abbey” role. —Ed.) Where does one start? Well, I got so much help from clips of her work on YouTube.

“This time, because Chris was here, I found out that he included the Maggie Smith imitation because he wrote the role for his friend Christine Nielsen, and she had just started doing her Maggie Smith imitation at lunch one day. Chris said that someday he’d include it for a character he’d write for her, and Sonia is such a lovely character.”

The play is about a reunion of three siblings, all named after Chekhov characters by their scholarly academic parents. Vanya and Masha are siblings by birth, but Sonia was adopted when he was a young child.

“Even though she isn’t sure that her family really loves her or is just pretending to love her, Sonia stayed home and cared for her parents,” Madigan says, “and she says that their final years were very difficult. Masha, meanwhile, was off in Hollywood being a ‘B’ movie queen and supporting the New Hope household with her earnings once the parents’ money was used up, and Masha returns with the intention of telling them that she intends to sell the house because things are not so rosy financially for her.

“She brings along Spike, her newest and much younger toy boy,” she adds. “Spike quite dazzles the sheltered Sonia. She’s never even had a date, and here is this beautiful man, dripping machismo, under her very roof. Although she respects and loves Masha as any younger sister would do, she also envies Masha her success and her love life.”

Kaller and Madigan agree that labeling the play just a comedy is a mistake.

“Yes, it’s very funny,” Kaller says, “especially with the introduction of Cassandra and her visions and prophecies and that absurd costume party about which Masha is so insistent, but it’s more than just funny. All great plays are about many things, and these characters, true to their Chekhovian roots and Chris’ sense of the ridiculous and the real, are about love and loss and pain and loyalty and family, all very universal and timeless things, things anybody can relate to.”

“Durang the playwright has been so generous in giving each of the play’s people a chance to open up to the audience,” Madigan says.

“For Sonia, it’s a telephone scene in Act Two, and for Vanya, it’s a long speech near the end,” she adds. “I can easily understand how Chris, the actor, would want a crack at that, and he does such a wonderful job with it. Even though Chris was an only child himself, he’s gotten the whole siblings thing spot on!”